L·ACTU

Set up jointly by HEC Lausanne (UNIL) and EPFL, this combined data science and management program offers a promising opportunity for all executives who are looking to ride the wave of digitization! The course will cover the knowledge and tools needed as part of a corporate strategy in order to capitalize on digital data. Managers and engineers are both welcome.

While everyone now agrees that digital data are a critical weapon in the corporate war, exploiting their added value and full potential remains a major challenge. And that challenge is no longer simply confined to the IT department: it now concerns executives working in areas such as HR, marketing or operations. “Digitization is not simply a question of integrating new technologies; it’s about developing an entire system, which includes our business models, organizations and job roles. Data play an essential role,” explains Prof. Christine Legner, joint director of the CAS for HEC Lausanne and director of the Department of Information Systems.

So, how do you turn your business into an organization that is capable of exploiting its data efficiently – in other words, a ‘data-driven enterprise’? How do you format and structure your data so that they are usable, and which challenges can they truly meet? Finally, how do you integrate this digitization into your business culture and ethics?

All of these issues will be addressed in the new CAS program developed and run jointly by HEC Lausanne and EPFL. The program offers an overview for anyone who would rather lead the digital transformation process rather than simply put up with it. “And no need to know how to code to take part,” explains Dr. Olivier Verscheure, joint director of the CAS for EPFL and director of the Swiss Data Science Center.

What exactly does the program offer? The combination of data science and management offered by this CAS (Certificate of Advanced Studies), which will start at the end of June, is a first: people are no longer talking just about digital transformation but changing the business and individual careers through data.

Delivered at UNIL in English, the program provides 16 days of training over a period of nine months, from June 2018 to February 2019. Organized in four blocks of four days, the various modules can also be taken individually. One of the major advantages of the course is that each participant will develop their own applied integration project throughout the program, with support from the experts at HEC Lausanne and EPFL. The practical ambition behind each project will be to move a business towards being a data-driven enterprise.